Been having some issues with my on board sound-card recently and I think it may be broken.

Few weeks ago I moved my computer case forward when plugging in a usb and I think I may have knocked the rear audio jack a bit, though it seemed fine at the time. I then noticed that the sound coming out of my speakers and headphones was.. terrible. I’m not sure how to explain it there was just a lot of distortion over the sounds of the game or music.

While playing about I discovered a strange fix where if I had something plugged into the front audio ports on the case at the same time then the sound coming out of the rear/on board audio was fine again. So I just kept some old earphones plugged into the front at all times and that seemed to fix the problem. But after a few days all sound just suddenly stopped working.

I reinstalled the drivers and such as well as unplugged the case audio ports incase they were causing problems but it made no difference. Windows was recognising the on board sound card and and even showed the little green sound bars going up and down etc to represent sound playing although no sound was actually coming out . It then started going a bit crazy and failing to detect speakers that were plugged in, or sometimes thinking I had a microphone or headphones plugged in when I didn’t.

For now I am using a very old cheap sound card that I had from years ago which isn’t great but works.

Anyone got any ideas on what might be happening to my on board audio and how to fix it ?

Motherboard is a Asus P8P67 Pro R3

Cheers.